Chronicles the life of a mom, teacher, and writer trying to stay sane amid the chaos of daily life.

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May 9, 2011

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Sundays are usually work days for me, filled with class preparation and grading and writing my post for this site for Monday, as well as juggling all the sundry odds and ends of getting the kids and household ready for the coming week, while squeezing in my weekly exercise/walk with my neighbor friends. But since Sunday was Mother's Day, and the semester has finally ended, I gave myself the gift of no work at all yesterday--not a single bit--and it was glorious. So I'm re-posting this Mother's Day entry from last year, and hoping you will all forgive me for taking the day off! I hope Mother's Day weekend was beautiful for each of you, near and far.

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For my first Mother's Day (the first Mother's Day when I had a child out there in the world--my very first Mother's Day I was seven months pregnant), when L. was just 10 months old, my mom sent me a white t-shirt with "Mom" printed on the front. This was an unlikely gift, actually, for both the giver and the recipient (I'm not a t-shirt person), but she'd gotten the T-shirt for free and I was, after all, a "Mom" finally. I still have the shirt. I keep it folded in my drawer and it's moved with me three times now. I'm as attached to it as I would be to any thoughtful gift from someone I love--that shirt, a little corny and over-sized, is special to me because I connect it so closely with that first Mother's Day of mine.

Mother's Day for me, that first year when L. was 10 months old and beginning to walk, his rounded limbs all earnest energy and his cheeks puffed out in concentration at everything he did, was more than just a celebration of my role as a mother. It was, I think, a chance for me to move emotionally closer to the mothering women in my own life: to my mother, and to my grandmother living across the Atlantic, so many miles away. In those early days of motherhood I think I was still uncertain what the word "Mom" really meant. In those days it was about caring for a small child; loving him, tending to him, and putting his own needs before my own. It was about watching him begin to walk, toddling away from the grasp of my hands. He took his first substantial steps that day, Mother's Day 2001, and I watched him lurch out into the golden sunlight splashing across the grass, my heart about to break from pride and love.

Mother's Day 2004 was my first as a mother of two. It found me cradling my four-month-old daughter in my arms, at a local Greek restaurant. I felt so much more a "mom" then, tired still from sleepless nights, still carrying the pregnancy weight around my body like a heavy blanket, bowed over almost with nagging worry about T.'s upcoming surgery in July. L. was wired and rambunctious that day, I remember, and T. fussy and inconsolable. I wondered, as we sat under the arbor at the restaurant, all the other mothers apparently having calm, relaxed luncheons with their well-behaved offspring, if this was what the sum of being a mom meant--was it really all about the worry and fatigue, crowding out the joy of the day? Of course it wasn't--and isn't--but motherhood, I found out, has those two sides: the joy and the worry, the pride and the pangs of nostalgia, the struggles and the easy days, when it all seems so effortless.

in thinking about Mother's Day in more universal terms, I think I like what I heard a few years ago, on my way home from work one day, when I was listening to the local NPR jazz station. The theme for that hour of the show yesterday was--in honor of Sunday, of course--Mother's Day and motherly love. The host talked about his own love for his mother and his wife, but he made a stirring and, I thought, unusual point. He said that we should celebrate all women today, regardless of whether they are mothers or not; that Mother's Day is not just for mothers, but for all women--women who are, after all, the mothers of so much that is right in the world. Mother's Day shouldn't just be a day for brunches and breakfasts-in-bed, but a time to think instead of the far-reaching importance of the women to our worlds (and in our worlds)--individual and universal--whether they are mothers themselves or not.

I loved that idea/sentiment so much when I heard it and I always go back to it in my mind. It seems so especially timely, too, with what is going on in the world, to remember women as the givers of birth--of life--of so very much in this world.

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